Season One CINEOPOLIS hosts Dante and Christian reach the season finale of CINEOPOLIS feeling more human than human in a super-sized discussion of Ridley Scott’s stone-cold classic Blade Runner and Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 classic-in-the-making sequel, Blade Runner 2049.

We’ve visited lots of cities in this inaugural season of CINEOPOLIS, both real and imaginary, but there’s no way to talk about movie places and spaces without visiting the used-future dystopia of Blade Runner, arguably the seminal cinematic urban experience. And there are a lot of stops on that tour — from the Bradbury Building to the Tyrell Corporation’s corporate pyramid — but some of the most interesting stuff happens on the neon-and-rain-drenched streets of Los Angeles circa 2019 (as imagined in 1982). It’s an experience that has influenced designers, artists, and architects, to say nothing of other filmmakers, people like Villeneuve, who drew heavily on — and built up from — the world imagined by Scott and futurist Syd Mead to create a 2049 L.A. that feels more dystopian and, disconcertingly, familiar to our lived experience in real 21st century cities. Memories might disappear like tears in the rain, but the influence of Blade Runner endures well beyond the expiration date placed on it by short-sighted Hollywood executives nearly 40 years ago.

It’s unfair — and, frankly, a bit preposterous — to say Sofia Coppola is a divise filmmaker. But since the premiere of her first feature, The Virgin Suicides, in 1999, Coppola has had all sorts of criticism thrown at her to diminish her accomplishments and place in Hollywood: She’s only successful because her dad is Francis Ford Coppola. She only makes films about rich people. Her films are thin and unserious. And if they work it’s only because Francis edited them. On and on goes the tedious nonsense meant to undercut a female director with a singular voice and point of view. And anyone who has actually watched her films — actually watched them, with open eyes and an open mind — knows that a Sofia Coppola film tends to defy expectations. Sure Lost in Translation (2003) and Marie Antoinette (2006) and Somewhere (2010) have rich people at their centers, but they’re not about rich people. Rather, the focus is on their detachment from the world and culture around them. (And so what if they’re rich?)

Stephanie Zacharek has been one of Coppola’s biggest champions — and defenders — since the release of The Virgin Suicides. Currently the film critic at TIME, Zacharek has written for the Village Voice and Salon and, in 2015, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. She has written often, and eloquently, about Coppola and her films, building a difficult-to-dispute case for the director and her place in the conversation about American filmmaking. Zacharek’s keenly observed profile of Coppola, published by TIME in 2017 ahead of the release of The Beguiled, is as good an introduction to the filmmaker you can find. But her reviews are similarly illuminating — especially for how they expand our view on Coppola’s work. “Both Bob and Charlotte are strangers in a strange land, the strange land not being Japan, but their own skins,” Zacharek wrote about Lost in Translation for Salon in 2003. “A strong sense of place is a necessity in a movie about dislocation: The city knows for sure who it is; it's the people moving through it who are riddled with doubt and uncertainty.”

It’s that sense of place in Coppola’s films that led Dante to speak with Zacharek about the director. But like all conversations about Sofia Coppola, it proved elusive to get a firm grasp on the way Coppola uses places in her work. Compared to one of the more macho directors championed by film critics, Coppola’s placemaking is rarely showy (even when the place is as maximalist as Versailles) and often evanescent, drifting into your consciousness in such a way that you find yourself dwelling on a hotel bar or apartment or makeup room long after the credits roll. It’s a wondrous trick that only someone who spent a lifetime around films and filmmakers can pull off. “You can become a good enough filmmaker by watching,” Zacharek wrote in her 2017 TIME piece. “But you can’t become a great one without observing.”

This week, Dante and Zacharek make some observations of their own about Sofia Coppola.

This week, you belong to the city — or maybe just Michael Mann.

Lots of filmmakers have shot in cities, made movies about cities, blown up cities in intergalactic conflagrations. But none of them can touch Michael Mann as cinema’s preeminent urbanist. From his first feature, Thief (1981), to his most recent, Blackhat (2015), Mann’s films hum and throb with the energy and allure of the city: its streets and people, the dark nooks and rain-slicked alleys that provide shelter to crime, diners and domestic spaces where danger collides with domesticity. While Mann’s filmography is worthy of its own podcast series, on this week’s episode of CINEOPOLIS Christian and Dante dig into three of his most important — and importantly urban — films: Thief, Heat (1995), and Collateral (2004). Together they form a kind of unofficial trilogy of life in the city. But they also act as skeleton keys to understanding Mann’s films, his aesthetic, and what makes him such a singular force in American movies.

Get the lowdown about shooting on location in the Garden State. CINEOPOLIS Co-host Christian Nidan interviews David Schoner, Associate Director of the NJ Motion Picture and TV Commission. They discuss NJ-shot films like Cop Land, TV shows like The Sopranos, and its upcoming prequel film, The Many Saints of Newark — as well as the importance of states using financial incentives to lure in productions.

Holy urban planning, Batman! 

No superhero has had more on screen time than Batman — and that makes Gotham City one of the most explored fictional cities in entertainment history. From the sunny, clearly-LA Gotham of the 1960s Batman TV series to Tim Burton’s Gothic Expressionist Art Deco fantasia Gotham of the 1989 Batman film to the Burton-meets-Max Fleischer red-skies-at-night Gotham of Batman: The Animated Series, numerous directors and designers have left their mark on the perpetually-vexed-by-madness metropolis. But for our bat-bucks, one of the best — or, at least, the most interesting for the purposes of CINEOPOLIS — is the Gotham of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy: Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). The Gotham we encounter in each of the films is in their own way unique yet part of a contiguous whole, and together they help inform Nolan’s commentary on a paranoid America in the grips of the War on Terror while making their own statement on the nature of urbanism in the 21st century.

When Chad Oppenheim saw his first Bond film — The Man With the Golden Gun (1974), on some early home video format — he knew he “either wanted to be an evil villain or an architect.” He ultimately opted for architect (a good choice), and in 1999 founded Oppenheim Architecture + Design, which has designed projects around the world, from hotels (like the Pixar-themed sections of Shanghai Disney Resorts) to homes (like Michael Bay’s Los Angeles residence) to public projects (like the new pavilion at Miami’s Simpson Park Hammock). And while none of Oppenheim’s projects have been used as bases of villainy, there’s a clear line from his firm’s projects back to the kinds of cinematic bad guy hangouts that made such an impression on young Chad: direct integration into and inspiration from nature; strong impressions of modernism, postmodernism; a sneaky exterior minimalism that opens up to a kind of tasteful interior maximalism. Think John Lautner by way of Frank Lloyd Wright and Michael Mann and you’ll get a sense of Oppenheim’s aesthetic.

Still, movie evildoers have never been far from Oppenheim’s thoughts. And in 2019, he co-wrote with Andrea Gollin the book Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains, a coffee-table-sized survey of some of the best, most enduring, and architecturally interesting bad guy hideouts in movie history. The lineup is eclectic and, often, unexpected: the Vandamm House from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest; Lautner’s Malin Residence, also known as the Chemisphere, which was used Brian De Palma’s Body Double; Syndrome’s lair in The Incredible; the first Death Star; plenty of Bond hideouts, naturally. Lair is entertaining and thoughtful, with excellent schematic drawings by visual effects expert Carlos Fueyo. It’s also one of those books that makes you wonder, “How did no one do this before?!”

This week, Dante asks Chad that question as they dig into Lair, Oppenheim’s interest in the subject and how it impacts his architecture, and the enduring lure of where cinema villains live.

For more about the book, check out Dante’s story from the launch of Lair published by Metropolis in 2019. And definitely spend time digging through Oppenheim Architecture’s Instagram account for images and explorations of its work.

Hollywood is long on celebrities, but Robert Mitchum is in a class by himself. A monumental actor and a towering presence of a man, he was often described in totemic and geologic terms. He was “our last connection to the era when stars were icons, granite faces carved in mountains in close-up,” Stephen Hunter wrote in The Washington Post when Mitchum died in 1997. He had “a forehead like the polar icecap,” Hunter continued, “a good crop of wavy hair, cheekbones like bed knobs and a piercing chin.” For most of his career, Mitchum was the unquestionable center of gravity in dozens of set-bound studio pictures. But what happens when this weathered force of nature is dropped into the country’s stagflating built environment? The answer is The Friends of Eddie Coyle, director Peter Yates’ 1973 bummer noir adaptation of George V. Higgins’ novel of low-rent Boston hoods — with Mitchum’s Eddie at the center — scratching out meager existences on armed robberies, gun deals, and as pocket-change snitches for the feds. And it all takes place against the backdrop of Boston’s mid-century Brutalism and city planning. On this episode of CINEOPOLIS, co-hosts Christian and Dante discuss Eddie Coyle’s use of iconic Boston locations, how Yates makes the city a central character, and the role architecture plays in this epic downer of a film earning its status as an American classic.